Faculty News

for May, 2014

Professor Richard Painter was quoted in a Star Tribune article entitled "Taylor: Thanks to Recent Sales, Wolves' Value On Way Up." The article stated that Painter said "even though NBA teams seem to be drawing more interest from buyers, owning a team still has to make financial sense."

Professor Brad Clary was quoted in a Minnesota Lawyer article entitled "New Trial for Man Convicted of Murder." Clary stated, "Part of the problem is that the ultimate decision in both state and federal court on this is the matter of the discretion of the district judge. The Court of Appeals was having difficulty seeing why the state should be allowed to introduce the Spreigl prior bad acts evidence in the prosecution's case-in-chief as opposed to in rebuttal to the defendant's self-defense claim. I think the Court of Appeals was correct to be skeptical of that."

Professor Daniel Schwarcz testified to the House Housing and Insurance Subcommittee on the topic of systemic risk in insurance and several related legislative proposals. Schwarcz's testimony was directly related to his co-authored article, "Regulating Systemic Risk in Insurance," which is forthcoming in the University of Chicago Law Review.

Prof. Carbone to Speak at Conference in London on Tackling the 'Marriage Divide'

May 20, 2014

Professor June Carbone will speak at a conference entitled "Tackling the 'Marriage Divide': Challenges for the U.K. and Anglo-Saxon Nations" in London, England. The conference will feature an international group addressing the future of marriage. It is sponsored by Centre for Governance and Public Policy.

Professor Susan Wolf lectured at a symposium entitled "Understand Your Genome" sponsored by Illumina and the University of Minnesota. Participants received their full genome sequence and had an opportunity to hear from national experts. Wolf spoke on "The Debate on Return of Results and Incidental Findings."

Professor June Carbone's new book with Naomi Cahn, Marriage Markets: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family, will be featured in an online discussion by Firedoglake's Book Salon on Saturday, May 17, at 4:00 p.m. The public is welcome to participate.

Professor Jane Kirtley's op-ed, "Why the U.S. Constitution Gives You the Right to Know Lethal Injection's Secrets," was published in the Guardian on the same day that several news organizations filed a law suit seeking access to information about the sources and composition of the drugs used in executions. Kirtley argued that "The long-standing tradition of public oversight of executions, coupled with the recognition that accurate information about them is essential to promote informed debate, more than justify the argument that the constitution should require transparency in every aspect of the execution process." Secrecy, she wrote, "locks out death penalty advocates and adversaries alike."

Professor Richard Painter was quoted in a Reuters article that has since been translated into many different languages worldwide on Vice President Biden's son R. Hunter Biden's membership on the board of a Ukrainian gas company with close ties to Russia. "It's very clear the [federal financial conflict of interest] statute does not cover this, even if the statute applied to the vice president," said Painter. Painter said he does not believe that Vice President Biden should step back from working on issues affecting energy in Ukraine for appearance's sake. Painter did note, however, that "If I had been the lawyer for the vice president, I would have said, 'Try to get your son to get off that board,'" Painter said.

Professor June Carbone's new book, Marriage Markets: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family, was discussed in a Slate article entitled "Dad's Day in Court." The article looked at whether the perception that family law is unfair to fathers is still true.

Professor Susan Wolf will speak at two National Institutes of Health (NIH)-sponsored meetings on genomic research on May 13-14. The first is a meeting of the Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research Consortium on ethical, legal, and social issues in genomic research. Wolf participates in the consortium as an NIH-funded investigator. She will present on international work she has co-directed with colleagues at UCSF, Oxford, and the University of Basel on return of results in genomic research involving biobanks. The second meeting is an invitational Workshop on Scientific and Ethical Issues Related to Open Access HeLa Genomic Data. Wolf will present on the ethical implications of open versus controlled access to the data. For more on the HeLa Genome Access Working Group at NIH and the historic HeLa Genome Data Use Agreement, go to http://acd.od.nih.gov/hlgda.htm.

Professor Stephen Meili presented his research on the impact of human rights treaties on asylum jurisprudence and practice in Canada at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies in Montreal. Meili's empirical study, funded by a grant from the Robina Foundation, analyzed nearly 3,000 Canadian immigration tribunal and federal court decisions since 1990, as well as interviews with refugee lawyers, to determine the circumstances under which human rights treaties are most likely to assist asylum-seekers obtain relief. Among his other findings, Meili reported that treaties are most likely to help asylum-seekers when the treaty has been incorporated into domestic law and when the applicant is a woman.

Professor Richard Painter was quoted in a WalletHub report on how to avoid IRS audits. His advice was to be careful in preparing the return and avoid obvious areas of abuse such as unjustified home office deductions and other business expenses. Unreported income, he pointed out, is also a red flag for an audit of the entire return.

Professor Stephen Cribari will speak at "Who Owns Art? Who Owns Matisse?" a CLE event on May 8, from 5-7 p.m., at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA). In conjunction with the Matisse: Masterworks from the Baltimore Museum of Art exhibition, MIA partners with Thomson Reuters to host an intellectually stimulating and visually alluring panel discussion on the intersection of law and art. The panel will explore the legal aspects of art ownership and its complications. Recent movie blockbuster Monuments Men and national press have again peaked great interest in the questions around museum ownership, artist rights, and holding artwork in trust for the public. All of these topics will be addressed as related to the Matisse exhibition and MIA's collection.

Professor Susan Wolf will deliver a keynote address at Indiana University entitled "Genomic Surprises: Should We Give Patients & Research Participants Unexpected Findings of Clinical Importance?" This lecture is part of a conference entitled "Ethics at the Crossroads: Where Public Health, Genomics, Data and Translational Science Meet." It follows an invitational international workshop, in which Wolf will also participate, on ELSI 2.0, an effort to build a framework for international collaboration on ethical, legal, and social issues raised by genetics and genomics.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the launching of Professor Thomas Cotter's blog, ComparativePatentRemedies.com. The blog functions both as an ongoing supplement to his book, Comparative Patent Remedies: A Legal and Economic Analysis (Oxford University Press 2013), and as a forum for analysis of the latest cases, legislation, and scholarship relating to the law and economics of damages, injunctions, and other remedies for patent infringement in the world's leading patent systems. Over the past year, the blog has published over 200 posts and had over 45,000 page hits from around the globe.

Professor Paul Vaaler appeared in the "Good Question" segment on WCCO-TV News, answering the question "Why Do We Pay CEOs So Much To Leave?" Vaaler talked specifically about the recent resignation of Gregg Steinhafel, Chairman and CEO of Target.

Professor Thomas Cotter was quoted in a Winona Daily News article entitled "Emails Show Winona County Employee Passed Along Info on Disputed Solar Project." Cotter stated that a trade secret "can be essentially any information that has value, whether actual value or potential value," but that the owner of the purported secret must show that it took reasonable precautions to keep the information safe, and that it is not "always easy to quantify" the value of such information.

Professor June Carbone's work on single mothers, part of her new book, Marriage Markets: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family, with Naomi Cahn, was the subject of Ross Douthat's New York Times blog entry entitled "Making Men Marriageable."